VIVEK SHAH

To copy the table, click on Select and click and drag the cursor to highlight the whole table. Then press Ctrl C (to copy this).

Open a new Word document and paste the copied text by pressing Ctrl V. This should look as follows:

Now convert this into a table by highlighting it all (you can easily do this by pressing Ctrl A) and 

For Office 2003

selecting Table > Convert > Text to Table. A dialogue box will pop up and under Separate Text at, you should select Other and click in the little box next to it; delete what is there and type in a space. Press OK.

For Office 2007

A dialogue box will pop up and under Separate Text at, you should select Other and click in the little box next to it; delete what is there and type in a space. Press OK.

A table will appear (poorly formatted) which will be all highlighted. While still highlighted, copy this by pressing Ctrl C.

Open a new blank Excel document. The first cell should be highlighted. Click in this cell and past in the table you have copied from Word. To do this, simply press Ctrl V. This will give you a table similar to that below.

You will now need to do a little manipulation. It will help if you have an Insert Row and a Delete Row icon in your toolbar at the top

First ensure that the columns are correctly aligned. In the above, row 5 is one cell too far to the left. To rectify this, click in cell A5 (currently labelled BE). Then click on Insert > Cells > Shift Cells Right and then OK. This will move all the entries in row 5 one column to the right.

Next delete unwanted rows, by selecting the row (click on the row number in the left-hand column) and then pressing the delete row icon (). In the above table you will probably want to delete rows 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 and 7. If you want to work out average inflation rates over the period 1961 to 2008, you will also want to delete all except rows 5, 8, 9, 20, 31 and 40.